INAUGURAL ADDRESS 


OF 

SOLOMON SCHECHTER 

M.A., LITT.D. (Cantab.) 

AS 

PRESIDENT OF THE FACULTY 
OF THE 

JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA 


DELIVERED 

NOVEMBER 20, 1902 


NEW YORK 


PRESS OF S. S. ROSEN, 
721-723 BROADWAY, N. Y. 



* 

* 

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* 


> -t ft 







1 








/ 







THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF 

Professor Solomon Schechter* 

- « - 

Among the regulations relating to the benedic¬ 
tions which the Jew is bound to utter on various 
occasions there is one running thus: 

Dmn Dsn *jra bmp' n«nn 

“He who sees a multitude of Israelites, says the 
benediction, blessed be He who is the sage of all 
these mysteries.” So far the Rabbis. By mysteries 
they do not mean those closet-skeletons of which 
the author of “Vanity Fair” knew so much, and of 
which respectability, sometimes even decency, de¬ 
mands that they should remain hidden away in 
some dark recess. Judaism is not a religion that 
spies upon personal secrets; and least of all would 
they be distinguished by a blessing, the great rule 
being 

nbp^pn by pmno 

“Decay and decadence are not the special themes 
of thanksgiving.” What the Rabbis meant here by 
“mysteries” was that diversity in feeling and varia¬ 
tion in thinking which confer individuality and char¬ 
acter upon each member of the species, to such a 
degree as to crowd our planet with as many micro¬ 
cosms as there are men and women, each governed 




6 


JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


by its own laws and moving round its own sun. It 
is this individualism which practically makes each 
man a profound and complete mystery to the other, 
and it was this mystery of individualism, or, as the 
Rabbis phrase it, “the unending variations of mind 
and the difference of facial expression” registering 
our emotions that called forth the admiration of the 
Rabbis and caused the institution of the blessing. 

But nowhere is the force of this mystery more 
deeply felt than in addressing an audience recruited 
from the Jewish community of this great city of 
New York. Like the first man (Adam) in the 
fable, whose clay (constituting his body) was gath¬ 
ered from the four corners of the earth, this com¬ 
munity is made up of the elements drawn from all 
parts of our globe. But while the miscellaneous 
factor in the creation of the race aimed, as it was 
finely explained, at making man a citizen of the 
world, the same process has had the very opposite 
effect with our community. Each train of arriving 
immigrants has brought its own idiosyncrasies and 
peculiarities, its own ritual and ceremonies, and its 
own dogmas and dogmatisms, all of which are 
struggling for existence and perpetuation, thus con¬ 
verting the New World into a multitude of petty 
Old Worlds. My stay in this country is not of suffi¬ 
ciently long duration to justify any authoritative 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


7 


statement on my part, but even so far as my short 
experience goes I can safely say that New York 
alone could furnish us with an epitome of all the 
Judaisms or Richtungen scattered all over the world, 
ranging from the precisionism and mysticism of the 
far East to the advanced radicalism of the far West, 
in addition to the shadowy no-Judaisms of the Bor¬ 
derland. 

Such a community is indeed a mystery. And this 
mystery has become perplexing; for it is amidst all 
these Judaisms and no-Judaisms that my colleagues 
and myself are called upon to create a theological 
centre which should be all things to all men, recon¬ 
ciling all parts and appealing to all sections of the 
community. If I understand correctly the intention 
of those who honored me with their call, and if I 
interpret my own feelings aright, this school should 
never become partisan ground or a hotbed of po¬ 
lemics, making “confusion worse confounded. ,, The 
name of the Holy One, blessed be He, is Peace, and 
the place erected to His name, and to the cultiva¬ 
tion of His Torah, should, to use the figurative lan¬ 
guage of the Rabbis, be the spot on the horizon 
“where heaven and earth kiss each other”; while 
those who study there should in some way partici¬ 
pate in and, as it were, anticipate the mission of 
Elijah, that was to consist not only in solving the 


8 


JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


difficulties of the Torah, and removing doubt, but 
also in bringing back the forcibly estranged, ar¬ 
bitrating between conflicting opinions, and giving 
peace to the world. 

Divine, however, as the work may be—and it 
could certainly not be accomplished without sup¬ 
port from heaven—it is not entirely superhuman, 
for the creation of which I have just spoken is not a 
Creaiio ex nthilo. The foundations are laid and the 
materials are given. 

I am thinking, in the first instance, of the sainted 
Dr. Sabato Morais, the finest specimen of a Jewish 
martyr—that is, one who lived, not only died, as a 
martyr—whose very sight was an inspiration, and 
whose simplest utterance was a stimulus to faith 
in God and His Torah. His name will always be 
remembered for good as the founder of the Jewish 
Theological Seminary. For this institution he lived 
and labored the last eleven years of his life, during 
which he acted as President of the Faculty, in 
which his spirit will always remain an active and 
living force: the Rev. Dr. Alexander Kohut, the 
great Jewish scholar and author of the monumental 
work Aruch Completum, the greatest and finest 
specimen of Hebrew learning ever produced by any 
Jew on this continent, who acted for the last years 
of his life as Professor of Midrash and Talmudic 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER’S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


9 


Methodology, and even when death was already 
overshadowing him spared himself not, and impart¬ 
ed instruction to the students of the Seminary. I 
am further thinking of the Directors of this institu¬ 
tion. The modesty of these Princes in Israel, which 
shrinks back from all publicity and adheres con¬ 
scientiously to the great maxim that virtue is and 
must remain its own reward, forbids me to be ex¬ 
plicit. But we may mention here the names of those 
departed: Mr. Joseph Blumenthal, the President of 
the old Board of Trustees, to whose signal devotion 
this institution owes to a considerable extent its 
continued existence; Mr. Leonard Lewisohn, a de¬ 
voted Jew, one of our greatest philanthropists, 
whose benevolence extended to two hemispheres, 
and who was one of the first founders of the recon¬ 
structed Seminary; Dr. Aaron Friedenwald, a 
scholar and a gentleman, who held the office of di¬ 
rector, both in the old and in the newly constituted 
Board, and whose interest in the institution only 
ceased with life itself. With the Son of Sirach we 
should say: 

“For a truth these were godly men, 

And their hope shall not perish; 

With their seed goodness remains sure, 

And their inheritance unto children’s children; 

Their memory standeth forth forever 

And their righteousness shall not be forgotten.” 


10 


JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


With such models of energy and conviction, of 
activity and saintliness, the Seminary should not be 
at a loss to continue the work which these great 
souls have prepared and ripened. 

It should, however, be pointed out that the direct¬ 
ors of the reconstructed Seminary have also given 
us some excellent hints as to the nature and char¬ 
acter of the work before us. Their words are: 

" The Jewish Theological Seminary of America was 
incorporated by a law of the State of chfew York, ap¬ 
proved February 20, i902 t for the perpetuation of the 
tends of the Jewish religion, the cultivation of Hebrew 
literature, the pursuit of Biblical and Archaeological re¬ 
search, the advancement of Jewish scholarship, the 
establishment of a library and for the education and 
training of Jewish rabbis and teachers/' 

These words are taken from the Charter, forming 
the constitution of the Seminary, but, like all consti¬ 
tutions, this also may profitably be submitted to the 
process of interpretation and expansion. This 
method we call Midrash. To this Midrash the rest 
of my address will be largely devoted. 

Put into somewhat less technical, or rather less 
legal, terms, the ideals at which the Directors of this 
institution aim are the promotion of Jewish learning 
and the training for the Jewish ministry. By learn- 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


11 


ing or scholarship we understand a thorough and 
accurate knowledge of Jewish literature, or at least 
of parts of it. The duty of accuracy, even in the most 
minute details of a subject, cannot be shirked. 
“Through my intercourse with great men,” says 
Humboldt in his Cosmos, “I early arrived at the con¬ 
viction that without a serious attention to details 
all generalizations and theories of the universe are 
mere phantasms. ,, I know that the acquiring of de¬ 
tails is a very tiresome and wearisome affair, and 
may well be described in the language of the old 
Rabbis: “The part of wisdom learned under wrath.” 
But, unfortunately, there is no “snap-shot” process 
for acquiring learning. It has its methods and laws, 
as ancient as time itself, and these none can evade 
or escape. “If a man will tell thee,” the old saying 
was, “I have found Wisdom, but labored not (for 
it), believe him not.” The probability is that he 
found nothing worth having. 

It is true that occasionally we speak of a “Re¬ 
public of letters,” a term which may be interpreted 
to imply that a certain freedom of treatment is 
granted to genius. Apart, however, from the fact 
that we are not all Shakespeares or Goethes, or 
even Walt Whitmans, it should be remembered 
that Republicanism does not mean anarchy. Bad 
grammar, faulty construction, wrong quotations and 


12 


JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


mistranslations mean with the student in the do¬ 
main of literature what lawlessness and anarchy 
mean to the citizen in common life. And much as 
we may differ as to the eccentricities of a Walt 
Whitman, I am sure that we will all agree that 
ignorance of the language of the sacred literature of 
Israel in persons undertaking to teach Judaism has 
by no means any claim upon our forbearance as the 
vagary of genius, and has to be opposed as objec¬ 
tionable and pernicious. 

Not less objectionable than actual ignorance is 
artificial ignorance. By this I understand that pecu¬ 
liar attitude of mind which, cognizant of the fact that 
there were such things as the eighteenth century and 
the nineteenth century, with their various move¬ 
ments and revolutions in all departments of human 
thought, somehow manages to reduce them to a 
blank, as if they had not been. My friends, they 
have been! There has been such a thing as a ra¬ 
tionalistic school, though not all its members have 
been rational. There has been such a thing as a 
critical school, though not all its adherents have 
been real critics. Arianism of the vulgar sort, and 
Marcionism of the nineteenth century type, have 
had their share in this work. There has been such 
a thing as an historical school, although not all 
those who were of it interpreted history in the right 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


13 


way. All these movements are solemn facts, and 
they can as little be argued away by mere silence 
as pain and suffering can be removed from the 
world by the methods of Christian Science. 

Mark, too, that there is no intellectual wave that 
breaks upon our mental horizon which, disastrous 
as it may appear to us, will not have some bene¬ 
ficial effect in the end. It may wreak desolation 
when it comes; it may leave the beach strewn with 
loathsome monsters when it recedes, but at the 
same time it will deposit a residuum of fresh mat¬ 
ter, often fruitful and fructifying. To give one in¬ 
stance from our own history, I will only recall to 
your minds the Karaitic Schism. Vile and violent 
were its attacks upon the tradition of the Fathers, 
and the breach is not healed to this very day, but it 
had also the blessed effect of giving a wholesome 
impetus to the study of the Bible, which resulted in 
producing a school of Grammarians and Exegetes, 
and perhaps also of Massorites, such as Judaism 
had never seen before. 

Thus these movements may all contain grains and 
germs of truth, or at least may provide the nidus 
for the further development of truth, and with all 
this the student must be made acquainted. What 
they have to offer may not always be pleasant to 
hear, but this must be accepted as a judgment of 


14 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 

God, passed upon us for allowing our inheritance— 
especially the Bible—to be turned over to strangers. 
At the same time the follies and extravagances, oc¬ 
casionally also the ineffable ignorance, displayed by 
some of the leaders of these movements should also 
be exposed, for the demand they make for blind 
faith in the hypotheses they advance is even more 
exacting than that made by the old orthodoxies, 
and young men should be warned against their pre¬ 
tensions. “Even the youngest among us may some¬ 
times err,” was the answer of a Master of Trinity 
College, Cambridge, to a forward youth, and simi¬ 
larly I venture to express the possibility that even 
the “newest” among us may sometimes go wrong. 

The crown and climax of all learning is research. 
The object of this searching is truth—that truth 
which gives unity to history and harmony to the 
phenomena of nature, and brings order into a uni¬ 
verse in which the naked eye perceives only strife 
and chance. But while in search of this truth, of 
which man is hardly permitted more than a faint 
glimpse, the student not only re-examines the old 
sources, but is on the constant lookout for fresh 
material and new fields of exploration. These en¬ 
able him to supply a link here and to fill out a gap 
there, thus contributing his humble share to the sum 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER’S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


15 


total of truth, which, by the grace of God, is in a 
process of constant self-revelation. 

I may, perhaps, point out in passing, as I did on 
a somewhat similar occasion, “that this passionate 
devotion to the study of ancient MSS., which you 
may possibly have observed in some students, has 
not its source in mere antiquarianism or love of 
curios. The famous R. Nissim Gaon, the corre¬ 
spondent of R. Sherira and R. Hai Gaon, the author 
of the Mafteach, says, in the introduction to his 
work, ‘And I entreat everybody who will profit by 
the study of this book to pray to God for me and 
cause me to find mercy whether I am alive or dead.’ 
Nowadays we are not always in a praying mood. 
With Hegel, some of us believe that thinking is also 
praying. But the sensation we experience in our 
work is not unlike that which should accompany 
our devotions. Every discovery of an ancient docu¬ 
ment giving evidence of a bygone world is, if under¬ 
taken in the right spirit—that is, for the honor of 
God and the truth and not for the glory of self— 
an act of resurrection in miniature. How the past 
suddenly rushes in upon you with all its joys and 
woes! And there is a spark of a human soul like 
yours come to light again after a disappearance of 
centuries, crying for sympathy and mercy even as 
R. Nissim did. You dare not neglect the appeal and 


16 


JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


slay this soul again. Unless you choose to become 
another Cain you must be the keeper of your brother 
and give him a fair hearing. You pray with him 
if he happens to be a liturgist; you grieve with him 
if the impress left by him in your find is that of 
suffering; you fight for him if his voice is that of 
ardent partisanship, and you even doubt with him 
if the garb in which he makes his reappearance is 
that of an honest sceptic—-‘Souls can only be kissed 
through the medium of sympathy.’ ” 

But it is with truth as it is with other ideals and 
sacred possessions of man. “Every generation,’’ the 
ancient Rabbis say, “which did not live to see the re¬ 
building of the Holy Temple must consider itself 
as if it had witnessed its destruction.” Similarly we 
may say that every age which has not made some 
essential contribution to the erection of the Temple 
of Truth and real Wissenschaft is bound to look upon 
itself as if it had been instrumental in its demolition. 
For it is these fresh contributions and the open¬ 
ing of new sources, with the new currents they 
create, that keep the intellectual and the spiritual 
atmosphere in motion and impart to it life and 
vigor. But when, through mental inertia and moral 
sloth, these fresh sources are allowed to dry, stagna¬ 
tion and decay are sure to set in. The same things 
happen which came to pass when Israel’s sanctuary 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


17 


was consumed in fire. Said R. Phineas ben Yair: 
“Since the day on which the Holy Temple was de- 
troyed the Socit and the sons of freedom lie 

under the cloud of shame, and their heads are cov¬ 
ered (in mourning) ; men of (real) deeds are neg¬ 
lected, while the ‘men of elbow' and the ‘masters of 
the tongue' gain strength." 

I have thus far spoken of the Seminary as a place 
of learning. We must now proceed to consider it in 
its particular aspect as a training school for the 
Jewish ministry. Now, we all agree that the office 
of a Jewish minister is to teach Judaism; he should 
accordingly receive such a training as to enable him 
to say: " Judaeici nihil a me alienum puto/' “I re¬ 
gard nothing Jewish as foreign to me." He should 
know everything Jewish—Bible, Talmud, Midrash, 
Liturgy, Jewish ethics and Jewish philosophy; Jew¬ 
ish history and Jewish mysticisms, and even Jewish 
folklore. None of these subjects, with its various 
ramifications, should be entirely strange to him. 

Remember, my friends, that there is no waste in 
the world of thought. Every good action, the mys¬ 
tics say, creates an angel; and every real thought, it 
may be said, creates even something better; it cre¬ 
ates men and women. In spite of all our “modern¬ 
ity," most of our sentiments are “nothing else but 
organized traditions; our thoughts nothing else but 


18 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


reminiscences, conscious and unconscious,” while in 
our actions we are largely executive officers, car¬ 
rying out the acts passed by a wise legislation of 
many years ago. We dare not neglect any part of 
this great intellectual bequest but at a serious risk 
and peril to ourselves. And the risk is the greater 
in Jewish literature—a literature pregnant with 
“thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” whose 
very pseudography became the sacred books of 
other nations, whose most homely metaphors were 
converted from literature into dogma. Nay, the 
very misunderstanding and misinterpretation of its 
terminology have given rise to a multitude of sects 
and orthodoxies and heresies still dividing human¬ 
ity. 

It was with the purpose of avoiding this risk that 
we—my colleagues and I—tried to draw up the cur¬ 
riculum of studies for the faculty, in such a way as 
to include in it almost every branch of Jewish litera¬ 
ture. We cannot, naturally, hope to carry the stu¬ 
dent through all these vast fields of learning at the 
cultivation of which humanity has now worked for 
nearly four thousand years. But this fact must not 
prevent us from making the attempt to bring the 
students on terms of acquaintance at least with all 
those manifestations of Jewish life and Jewish 
thought which may prove useful to them as future 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


19 


ministers, and suggestive and stimulating to them 
as prospective scholars. 

It is hardly necessary to remark that the Jewish 
ministry and Jewish scholarship are not irreconcil¬ 
able. The usefulness of the minister does not in¬ 
crease in an inverse ratio to his knowledge—as little 
as bad grammar is specially conducive to morality 
and holiness. Zunz’s motto was, “Real knowledge 
creates action” (thatenerzeugend) and the exist¬ 
ence of such men as R. Saadya Gaon and R. Hai 
Gaon, Maimonides, and Nachmanides, R. Joseph 
Caro and R. Isaac Abarbanel, Samson Raphael 
Hirsch and Abraham Geiger, and an innumerable 
host of other spiritual kings in Israel, all “mighty 
in the battles of the Torah,” and voluminous au¬ 
thors, and at the same time living among their peo¬ 
ple and for their people and influencing their con¬ 
temporaries, and still at this very moment sway¬ 
ing the actions and opinions of men—all these bear 
ample testimony to the truth of Zunz’s maxim. No, 
ignorance is not such bliss as to make special efforts 
to acquire it. There is no cause to be afraid of much 
learning, or, rather, of much teaching. The diffi¬ 
culty under which we labor is rather that there are 
subjects which cannot be taught, and yet do form an 
essential part of the equipment of a Jewish minister. 

But first let me say a few words about the general 


20 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


religious tendency this Seminary will follow. I am 
not unaware that this is a very delicate point, and 
prudence would dictate silence or evasion. But life 
would hardly be worth living without occasional 
blundering, “the only relief from dull correctness.” 
Besides, if there be in American history one fact 
more clearly proved than any other it is that “Know- 
nothingism” was an absolute and miserable failure. 
I must not fall into the same error. And thus, 
sincerely asking forgiveness of all my dearest 
friends and dearest enemies with whom it may be 
my misfortune to differ, I declare, in all humility, 
but most emphatically, that I do know something. 
And this is that the religion in which the Jewish 
ministry should be trained must be specifically and 
purely Jewish, without any alloy or adulteration. 
Judaism must stand or fall by that which distin¬ 
guishes it from other religions as well as by that 
which it has in common with them. Judaism is not 
a religion which does not oppose itself to anything 
in particular. Judaism is opposed to any number of 
things, and says distinctly “thou shalt not.” It per¬ 
meates the whole of your life. It demands control 
over all your actions, and interferes even with your 
menu. It sanctifies the seasons, and regulates your 
history, both in the past and in the future. Above 
all, it teaches that disobedience is the strength of 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


21 


sin. It insists upon the observance both of the spirit 
and of the letter; spirit without letter belongs to the 
species known to the mystics as “nude souls” 
pnBBO wandering about in the universe 
without balance and without consistency, the play 
of all possible currents and changes in the atmos¬ 
phere. In a word, Judaism is absolutely incom¬ 
patible with the abandonment of the Torah. Nay, 
the very prophet or seer must bring his imprimatur 
from the Torah. The assertion that the destruction 
of the Law is its fulfilment is a mere paradox, 
and recalls strongly the doctrines of Sir Boyle 
Roche, “the inimitable maker of Irish bulls. He de¬ 
clared emphatically that he would give up a part, 
and, if necessary, the whole of the constitution, to 
preserve the remainderl” 

President Abraham Lincoln, the wisest and great¬ 
est of rulers, addressed Congress on some occasion 
of great emergency with the words: “Fellow citi¬ 
zens, we cannot escape history.” Nor can we, my 
friends. The past, with its long chain of events, 
with its woes and joys, with its tragedies and ro¬ 
mances, with its customs and usages, and above all 
with its bequest of the Torah, the great entail of the 
children of Israel, has become an integral and in¬ 
alienable part of ourselves, bone of our bone and 
flesh of our flesh. We must make an end to these 


22 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


constant amputations if we do not wish to see the 
body of “Israel” bleed to death before our very eyes. 
We must leave off talking about Occidentalizing our 
religion—as if the Occident has ever shown the least 
genius for religion—or freeing the conscience by 
abolishing various laws. These, and similar plati¬ 
tudes and stock phrases borrowed from Christian 
apologetics, must be abandoned entirely if we do 
not want to drift slowly but surely into Paulinism, 
which entered the world as the deadliest enemy of 
Judaism, pursued it through all its course and is 
still finding its abettors among us, working for their 
own destruction. Lord, forgive them, for they 
know nothing. Those who are entrusted with car¬ 
rying out the purpose of this institution, which, as 
you have seen, aims at the perpetuation of the tenets 
of the Jewish religion, both pupils and masters, must 
faithfully and manfully maintain their loyalty to the 
Torah. There is no other Jewish religion but that 
taught by the Torah and confirmed by history and 
tradition, and sunk into the conscience of Catholic 
Israel. 

I have just hinted at the desirability of masters 
and pupils working for one common end. You must 
not think that our intention is to convert this school 
of learning into a drill ground where young men 
will be forced into a certain groove of thinking, or^ 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


23 


rather, not thinking; and after being equipped with 
a few devotional texts, and supplied with certain 
catchwords, will be let loose upon an unsuspecting 
public to proclaim their own virtues and the infalli¬ 
bility of their masters. Nothing is further from our 
thoughts. I once heard a friend of mine exclaim 
angrily to a pupil: “Sir, how dare you always agree 
with me?” I do not even profess to agree with 
myself always, and I would consider my work, to 
which, with the help of God, I am going to devote 
the rest of my life, a complete failure if this institu¬ 
tion would not in the future produce such extremes 
as on the one side a raving mystic who would de¬ 
nounce me as a sober Philistine; on the other side, an 
advanced critic, who would rail at me as a narrow¬ 
minded fanatic, while a third devotee of strict ortho¬ 
doxy would raise protest against any critical views 
I may entertain. “We take, ,, says Montaigne, “other 
men’s knowledge on trust, which is idle and super¬ 
ficial learning. We must make it our own.” The 
Rabbis express the same thought with allusion to 
Ps. I., 2, which they explain to mean that what is 
first—at the initiation of man into the Law—God’s 
Torah, becomes, after a sufficient study, man’s own 
Torah. Nay, God even deigns to descend to man’s 
own level so as not to interfere with his individual¬ 
ity and powers of conception. I reproduce in para- 


24 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


phrase a passage from a Midrash: “Behold now, 
how the voice of Sinai goes forth to all in Israel 
attuned to the capacity of each; appealing to the 
sages according to their wisdom; to the virile ac¬ 
cording to their strength; to the young according to 
their aspiring youthfulness, and to the children and 
babes according to their innocence; aye, even to the 
women according to their motherhood.” All that I 
plead for is that the voice should come from Sinai, 
not from Golgotha; that it should be the voice of 
Jacob, not of Esau. The Torah gave spiritual ac¬ 
commodation for thousands of years to all sorts and 
conditions of men, sages, philosophers, scholars, 
mystics, casuists, school men and sceptics; and it 
should also prove broad enough to harbor the differ¬ 
ent minds of the present century. Any attempt to 
place the centre of gravity outside of the Torah 
must end in disaster. We must not flatter ourselves 
that we shall be allowed to land somewhere mid¬ 
way, say in some Omar Khayyam Cult or in some 
Positivists’ Society or in some other agnostic make¬ 
shift. No, my friends, there are laws of gravitation 
in the spiritual as there are in the physical world; 
we cannot create halting places at will. We must 
either remain faithful to history, or go the way of all 
flesh, and join the great majority. The teaching in 
the Seminary will be in keeping with this spirit, 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


25 


and thus largely confined to the exposition and elu¬ 
cidation of historical Judaism in its various mani¬ 
festations. 

But as I have hinted before, not everything can be 
taught. I am referring to those things undefinable, 
which may be best described by using the Talmudic 
phrase “things handed over to the heart” which can¬ 
not be imparted by word of mouth, or by any visible 
sign. Take, for instance, the Fifty-first Psalm, com¬ 
mencing “Have mercy upon me, O God!” We have 
the means of teaching how to parse the Hebrew and 
how to render it into fair English, but we are ut¬ 
terly helpless should we attempt to convey any idea 
of the agony and anguish which wrung from the 
Psalmist this cry—of the misery and bitterness 
which he felt at the thought that transgression and 
sin may lead to his being cast away from the pres¬ 
ence of God, and to the loss of his holy spirit; and of 
the sudden exaltation and gladness he experienced 
in anticipating the time when a broken heart and a 
contrite spirit would bring back to him the lost joy 
of salvation and restore the interrupted communion 
between the repentant son and his Father in heaven. 
Or take the concluding lines of the Malchiyoth 
benediction on New Year’s Day that read: “Our 
God and God of our fathers, reign Thou in Thy 
glory over the whole universe and be exalted over 


26 


JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


the whole earth in Thine honor, and shine forth in 
the splendor and excellence of Thy might upon all 
the inhabitants of our world.” We can easily lec¬ 
ture on the history of this prayer, and even make a 
guess as to its date and authorship; but we should 
certainly fail were we to try to make one understand 
what the Kingdom of God on earth really meant for 
the saints of Israel, whose whole life was nothing else 
than a preparation for entering into the Kingdom. 
Wooden theologians speak of a theocracy, as of a 
sort of Jewish hierarchy after the Roman model, 
only with a Rabbi Maximus as its head. This was 
not the ideal for which so many noble men and 
women suffered martyrdom and which inspired the 
great “Unknown” to his divine poem VTIN' 

the Jewish “Marseillaise.” It was the blissful vision 
of love triumphant, righteousness triumphant, truth 
triumphant, which animated and dictated these 
lines. But here I am explaining dark riddles by ob¬ 
scure terms. Or lastly, take the first lines of R. 
Jehuda Ha-Levi’s poem on the advent of the Sab¬ 
bath, running thus: “To Thy love I drink my cup.” 
The Sabbath was for him a reality in which Israel’s 
sweet singer saw a reflex of the great Sabbath when 
the Kingdom of God would be established. But 
how one can fall in love with such an abstract idea 
as a span of time can only be divined by love itself. 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


27 


In the famous Praise of Wisdom the Sophia or the 
Torah proclaims: “I am the mother of fair love and 
fear and knowledge and holy hope.” But it is only 
filial devotion which will elicit mother’s answer and 
touch the mystic chord of things undefinable, only 
transmissible through the means of an appeal from 
soul to soul. But suppose a person has no soul, or, 
what comes to the same thing, persuades himself 
he has none? “Saving souls” is a favorite phrase 
with theologians. The soul being, according to Jew¬ 
ish mystics—long before Emerson—a spark of the 
divine essence itself, I never believed it to be in 
much need of artificial aids to salvation. The “Spirit 
shall return unto God who gave it,” even against 
the will of theologians if need be. Our real diffi¬ 
culty is how to help the men without souls! 

Another problem presenting itself is how we are 
to teach the subject or thing called Life. I hardly 
need say that by Life I do not understand skill 
in arranging social and other attractions, or in¬ 
genuity in inventing sensational sermon headings. 
This is not Life. Everything tending to what is 
common or sensational must needs starve our bet¬ 
ter selves and ultimately result in spiritual death. 
What I mean by this term is the capacity for deal¬ 
ing with those occasions in our earthly career which 
by reason of intense joys or sorrow or the tender 


28 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 

sympathy which they evoke crowd years into mo¬ 
ments, and form, so to speak, portions of life in 
condensation. These occasions have always been 
controlled and assisted by religion. The Catholic 
Church made of some, sacraments, as in the case of 
marriage and death, and it has also created special 
Orders devoted to the work among the needy and 
the helpless. The Protestant Church has also its 
Settlements and has introduced into its seminaries 
pastoral theology, aiming, among other things, to 
instruct its clergy in the works of love and charity. 
But it must be confessed that we are still somewhat 
behind in this last respect. 

Pray let there be no misunderstanding about this 
point. The discovery of the virtue of charity is not 
quite contemporaneous with the coining of that bar¬ 
baric word Altruism. The administration of charity 
was one of the earliest functions of the Synagogue 
from which it was borrowed by the primitive 
Church like so many other institutions. But recog¬ 
nizing no difference between the laity and the 
priesthood, or rabbihood, the exercise of this func¬ 
tion was not limited to any Order or special caste. 
The practice of the work of loving kindness, or 
Gemilaih Chasadim , a term including everything we 
understand by philanthropic and social work, had, 
as you know from your prayer book, no fixed meas- 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER’S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


29 


ure, and all classes of the community shared it. 
With regard to visiting the sick and ministering to 
the dying, I will only call to mind the oldest Jewish 
Society, the NG^Hp tnan a kind of Sacred Brother¬ 
hood, whose duty it was to nurse those who had no¬ 
body to attend to them, to be present at the supreme 
moment of man’s existence, and to read the pre¬ 
scribed prayers there, to arrange and prepare for the 
funeral procession and decent burial, and to com¬ 
fort the mourners by reciting prayers and “speaking 
to their hearts.” All these services were performed 
voluntarily and gratuitously, and those who per¬ 
formed them came from all classes of the com¬ 
munity, men and women. 

But times have changed; charity has become to 
some extent—I hope not entirely—a science, and a 
certain knowledge of political economy and sociol¬ 
ogy is required for its proper administration. It is 
therefore deemed advisable that the minister, who, 
as a rule, is connected with our charitable institu¬ 
tions, either as an active member of the board of 
management or as the spiritual adviser of the di¬ 
rectors, should receive some training in the afore¬ 
mentioned subjects. Again we live now in the age 
of specialization. Funerals and burials have been 
raised to the dignity of a fine art, and praying has 
become a close profession. The old Sacred Brother- 


30 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


hoods had thus to disappear, and their work mostly 
devolves now upon the minister. But how should 
we approach this part of our instruction? It should 
be remembered that the old Sacred Brotherhoods 
were, as already said, voluntary societies, and the 
very fact of a man’s joining them testified to his 
fitness to engage in the works of mercy and loving 
kindness. But a man may show the most brilliant 
record of undergraduate days and yet be utterly 
wanting in tact, delicacy, patience, sympathy, for¬ 
bearance and similar qualities necessary for the 
office of pastor. Sometimes a certain unwillingness 
to allow students to share in work of this kind is 
shown on the part of those who have a right to pro¬ 
test. The Jerusalem Talmud records a story of a 
famous Rabbi of Caesarea who sent his son to Ti¬ 
berias “to acquire merit there,” by studying Torah 
in the Rabbinic Academies of that city. But the 
boy, instead of attending to his lessons and lectures, 
became a “Gomel Chessed,” or, as we should now 
say, devoted himself to social work. His specialty 
was, it seems, that of burying the dead. Where¬ 
upon his father wrote to him: “Is it because there 
were no graves in Caesarea that I sent thee to Ti¬ 
berias?” This happened somewhere about the end 
of the third century, but in this respect times have 
not changed as far as my knowledge of universities 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


31 


and seminaries goes. Parents and guardians still 
object to their sons or wards attending funerals in¬ 
stead of lectures. But there is also another grave 
consideration. The social work included under the 
name of Gemilaih Chasadim forms in Judaism a part 
of Israel’s great Imitatio Dei. The Holy One, 
blessed be He, set the example Himself of perform¬ 
ing deeds of kindness to His creatures, and it is in¬ 
cumbent upon the whole of Israel, ‘‘the suite of the 
King,” as the ancients express it, to fashion their 
ways after the King. And I consider it not without 
danger to create a religious aristocracy which might 
soon claim the King entirely for themselves, and 
crowd the rest of us out from His Divine Presence. 
Such things have happened in other communities 
and may also happen to us when we create a sepa¬ 
rate class of religieux with a special purpose of as¬ 
sisting us in the most sacred, but also the most sen¬ 
sitive and weakest, moments of our being. 

George Eliot, in a letter to a spiritualist corre¬ 
spondent, says: “The great thing is to do without 
chloroform.” Judaism not only did without chloro¬ 
form, but, retaining its freshness and vigor, it also 
did without crutches, and found its way to heaven 
without any aid from man: it never employed spir¬ 
itual derricks. If a Jew wanted to pray, he prayed. 
If he felt any anxiety about his soul, he said: “Into 


32 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 

Thy hands I commit my spirit; Thou hast re¬ 
deemed me, O Lord, God of Truth.” If he felt 
the need of religious comfort he read a Psalm or 
two and had a good cry over that, and he received 
assurance; and if he was in the home of a dying 
friend he read: “Hear, O Israel!” VOW and a 

few other verses acknowledging the unity of God 
and His reign, and he felt sure that both he and his 
departed friend would have their share in the King¬ 
dom of Heaven. Now, on account of the frequent 
amputations we have lost our vigor and have sud¬ 
denly grown old and seem to be in need of artificial 
support like other denominations. The support 
has to be created. The circumstances require it. 
But, as I have said, the experiment is risky, and we 
can only pray with the Psalmist that God lead us 
in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake. 

However, I will not dwell any longer on our 
troubles and difficulties. Be they ever so many, and 
ever so serious, the old dictum of the rabbi still 
holds good: “It is not incumbent upon thee to finish 
the work, neither art thou free to desist from it,” 
and least of all dare we desist from our work; we 
whom Providence has transplanted into this great 
and glorious country, and each of whom may verily 
say with Joseph, “God did send me before you to 
preserve life.” 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


33 


My friends, in a letter by Maimonides, addressed 
to the Wise Men of Lunel, there occurs a passage to 
the following effect: “Be it known unto you, my 
masters and friends, that in these hard times none 
are left to lift up the standard of Moses and inquire 
into the world of the Rabbis but you. I am certain 
that you and the cities near you are continually es¬ 
tablishing places of learning and that you are men 
of wisdom and understanding. From all other places 
the Torah has utterly disappeared. The majority of 
the great countries are (spiritually) dead. The mi¬ 
nority is in extremis while three or four places are 
in a state of convalescence. * * * It is also 

known unto you what persecutions have been de¬ 
creed against the Jewish population of the West (of 
Europe). There is no help left to us but in you, 
our brethren, even the men of our kindred. Be of 
good courage, and let us behave ourselves valiantly, 
for our people and for the cities of God, since you 
are manly men and men of power.” 

This letter was written by Maimonides some 
seven hundred years ago. But how little times have 
changed. Substitute the words East or Northeast 
for West, and you have the tragedy repeated before 
your very eyes. It is now the East—from our part 
of the globe—which is old and ill, where persecution 
has been decreed, and which, if not actually dead, 


34 JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA. 


is very nearly in extremis; while it is the West that 
is throbbing with life and healthy activity, which is 
full of men of understanding and wisdom, of power 
and of influence. To these I venture to repeat the 
words of Scripture in the sense in which they were 
used by Maimonides: “Be of good courage and let 
us behave ourselves valiantly, for ourselves, and for 
the cities of our God.” Perhaps I may also repeat 
here another sentence of Maimonides: “Think not 
of thyself slightly, and do not despair of perfection.” 
Whether we shall reach perfection in this or any 
other task relating to Judaism which the great men 
of Israel of this country have set before themselves 
only the future can decide. But there is no reason 
for despairing; and the possibility of failure must 
in no way deter us. 

There is a passage in the Talmud: “It is not a 
great honor for the princess when her praise comes 
from her friend; it should come from her rival.” 
Ernest Renan, who never quite laid aside his St. 
Sulpice frock, and was never entirely free from 
Aryan prejudices, was certainly a rival, but he was 
a man of genius, and in spite of himself could not 
help occasionally saying true things; and his words 
are: “There will continue to be in Israel profound 
dreamers to assert that the work of God will never 
be complete until His true saints shall reign therein 


PROFESSOR SCHECHTER'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 


35 


(in the world). At the root of the lofty morality of 
this people is a longing that is never satisfied. The 
true Israelite is he who, in his discontent, thirsts 
always for the future, and the race is not yet ready 
to fail.” By the help of God we shall not fail. 


co ngress 



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